ABSTRACT
Higher education is no longer the exclusive domain of universities throughout the world. Although the modern university still enjoys and bestows prestige, and although it still receives public and private financial support, it finds itself increasingly in competition with other systems of information and knowledge dissemination: technical and vocational schools, media (print, film, radio, TV), research and resource centers, libraries, cultural festivals, art galleries and museums, audiovisual cassettes, industry colleges (for example, IBM, Kodak), distance education, and perhaps the most significant challenge, a rapidly expanding computer technology (Internet, E-mail, CD-ROM, etc.) creating an information highway whose potential has barely been realized. The Economist (Oct. 16,1993) comments:
[T]he new technologies matter because they liberate information. Fiber-optic channels will allow books to flow from place to place as easily as conversations do now, opening the libraries of the world to all. The technologies of television will make every camera an eye for the world to see through. Software will let people sift through this data to find the things they want to know. Combined, the three technologies might satisfy any hunger for knowledge, sacred or profane.
